Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Way of Being (1980)

  The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition. Thus it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth. If this “as if” quality is lost, then the state is one of identification. (pp. 210–211. See also Rogers, 1957.) EXPERIENCING AS A USEFUL CONSTRUCT In formulating my current description, I have drawn on the concept of “experiencing” as formulated by Gendlin (1962). This concept has enriched my thinking in various ways, as will be evident in this paper. Briefly, it is his view that at all times there is going on in the human organism a flow of experiencings to which the individual can turn again and again as a referent in order to discover the meaning of those experiences. An empathic therapist points sensitively to the “felt meaning” which the client is experiencing in this particular moment, in order to help him or her to focus on that meaning and carry it further to its full and uninhibited experiencing. An example may clarify both the concept and its relation to empathy. A man in an encounter group has been making vaguely negative statements about his father. The facilitator says, “It sounds as though you might be angry at your father.” The man replies, “No, I don’t think so.” “Possibly dissatisfied with him?” “Well, yes, perhaps” (said rather doubtfully). “Maybe you’re disappointed in him.” Quickly the man responds, “That’s it! I am disappointed that he’s not a strong person. I think I’ve always been disappointed in him ever since I was a boy.” Against what is the man checking these terms for their correctness? Gendlin’s view, with which I concur, is that he is checking them against the ongoing psychophysiological flow within himself to see if they fit. This flow is a very real thing, and people are able to use it as a referent. In this case, “angry” doesn’t match the felt meaning at all; “dissatisfied” comes closer, but is not really correct; “disappointed” matches it exactly, and encourages a further flow of the experiencing, as often happens.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As soon as I began to take note of things, I remarked that Lizzie no longer came near my room. One day I asked my sister what had become of her. To my astonishment my sister broke out in passionate dislike of her: “while you were lying unconscious”, she cried, “and the doctor was taking your pulse every few minutes, evidently frightened: he asked me could he get a prescription made up at once: he wanted to inject morphia, he said, to stop or check the racing of your heart. He wrote the prescription and I sent Lizzie with it and told her to be as quick as she could for your life might depend on it. When she didn’t come back in ten minutes, I got the Doctor to write it out again and sent Father with it. He brought it back in double-quick time. Hours passed and Lizzie didn’t return: she had gone out before ten and didn’t get back till it was almost one. I asked her where she had been? Why she hadn’t got back sooner? She replied coolly that she had been listening to the Band. I was so shocked and angry I wouldn’t keep her another moment. I sent her away at once. Think of it! I have no patience with such heartless brutes!” Lizzie’s callousness seemed to me even stranger than it seemed to my sister. I have often noticed that girls are less considerate of others than even boys, unless their affections are engaged, but I certainly thought I had half won Lizzie at least! However, the fact is so peculiar that I insert it here for what it may be worth. During my convalescence which lasted three months, Molly went for a visit to some friends: at the time I regretted it; now looking back I have no doubt she went away to free herself from an engagement she thought ill-advised. Missing her I went about with her younger, prettier sister Kathleen who was more sensuous and more affectionate than Molly. A little later, Molly went to Dresden to stay with an elder married sister: thence she wrote to me to set her free and I consented as a matter of course very willingly. Indeed I had already more real affection for Kathleen than Molly had ever called to life in me. As I got strong again I came to know a young Oxford man who professed to be astonished at my knowledge of literature and one day he came to me with the news that Grant Allen, the writer, had thrown up his job as Professor of Literature at Brighton College: “why should you not apply for it: it’s about two hundred pounds a year and they can do no worse than refuse you.”

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Mr Pickering wondered out loud in a tone that approached despair why I hadn’t used a putty knife any better than I had, and I wondered to myself why I was working for somebody like Calvin Pickering in a place called Auntie’s Antiques. To this point in my life I’d accomplished only what was minimally expected of me, which was almost nothing. My family and friends had done little to distinguish themselves,(they all drank a lot, they all had broken relationships or none, they all worked menial jobs or didn’t work at all), and my example was no more stellar. But Auntie’s Antiques? Was this where I truly belonged? Even the name of the place annoyed me, called up oppressive images of perfumed and prunelike old dowagers, clustered together in some ancient drawing room, murmuring inanely about sewing or flowers or recipes for apple crumb cake. Why not Larry’s Liquors? I asked myself, if we’re going to be alliterative, or Hootie’s Harleys, or Bob’s Big Boy, or— “Just what the hell kinda stripper you wanna be?” Mr Pickering demanded of me. “Huh? A first-class stripper that takes it off smooth and gorgeous the way you’re supposed to? Or a stripper that can’t strip?” Truth is, I was beginning to think I didn’t want to be a stripper period, but I didn’t figure that answer would’ve lifted my boss’s spirits. A few days later, when I made another trip to the Superfresh, I saw the girl again. This time, of course, I was watching for her. Once again it was summery twilight; a sprinkle of lightning bugs winked at me, and in the distance I could hear the sounds of a small-town baseball game: the postmodern plink of an aluminum bat, the collective shout 354 Greg Fenkins of a crowd. As before, I was lugging a couple of bags of groceries to the far recesses of the parking lot. I noted that the girl’s house was one of three that faced me from the opposite side of a narrow street adjacent to the lot. All three houses were dark and quiet; no one seemed to be stirring. Then the pink light came on, and the girl was in the window. (Had she been watching for me as well?) Like last time, she was clad in a skimpy bra and panties, neither of which provided more than technical coverage. They were a rich, devil’s-food-cake black on this occasion, and she had a sheer black scarf around her lovely neck. Soon she began to move, to dance, and I became conscious of my heart, which began thumping against the walls of my chest as if it wanted to escape.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “I’ll tell him we love each other and he won’t be angry for long”, whispered Jessie; but I was doubtful. As she got up to go my naughty hand went up her dress behind and felt her warm, smooth buttocks. Ah, the poignancy of the ineffable sensations; her eyes smiled over her shoulder at me and she was gone—and the sunlight with her. I still remember the sick disappointment as I sat in the boat alone. Life then like school had its chagrins, and as the pleasures were keener, the balks and blights were bitterer. For the first time in my life vague misgivings came over me, a heart-shaking suspicion that everything delightful and joyous in life had to be paid for—I wouldn’t harbor the fear. If I had to pay, I’d pay; after all, the memory of the ecstasy could never be taken away while the sorrow was fleeting. And that faith I still hold. Next day the Chief Steward allotted me a berth in a cabin with an English midshipman of seventeen going out to join his ship in the West Indies. William Ponsonby was not a bad sort, but he talked of nothing but girls from morning till night and insisted that negresses were better than white girls: they were far more passionate, he said. He showed me his sex; excited himself before me, while assuring me he meant to have a Miss LeBreton, a governess who was going out to take up a position in Pittsburg. “But suppose you put her in the family way?” I asked. “That’s not my funeral”, was his answer, and seeing that the cynicism shocked me, he went on to say there was no danger if you withdrew in time. Ponsonby never opened a book and was astoundingly ignorant: he didn’t seem to care to learn anything that hadn’t to do with sex. He introduced me to Miss LeBreton the same evening. She was rather tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, and she praised my reciting. To my wonder she was a woman and pretty, and I could see by the way she looked at Ponsonby that she was more than a little in love with him. He was above middle height, strong and good-tempered, and that was all I could see in him. Miss Jessie kept away the whole evening and when I saw her father on the “upper deck”, he glowered at me and went past without a word. That night I told Ponsonby my story, or part of it, and he declared he would find a sailor to carry a note to Jessie next morning if I’d write it.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Seventy-nine percent of white evangelicals had supported Bush’s 2004 reelection, but as his warrior status diminished, his approval rate steadily declined.28 Support for the president dropped most precipitously among younger white evangelicals. In 2002, 87 percent of white evangelicals ages eighteen to twenty-nine approved of the president’s job performance; by August 2007, his approval rating among this group had dropped by 42 percentage points, with most of the decline (25 points) occurring since 2005. Younger evangelicals weren’t just unhappy with the president; since 2005, Republican Party affiliation among this demographic had dropped by 15 percentage points. For leaders of the Christian Right this was cause for alarm. As the end of Bush’s presidency neared, they looked ahead with trepidation. To their dismay, they were presented with two unsatisfactory choices for his successor.29 Chapter 14 [image file=Image00000.jpg] SPIRITUAL BADASSESS ENATOR JOHN MCCAIN WAS A REPUBLICAN WAR hero who attended a Southern Baptist megachurch, but he had never embraced culture-wars evangelicalism. In 2000, when running against George W. Bush in the Republican primary, he had denounced those who practiced “the politics of division and slander” in the name of religion, party, or nation, and he urged voters to resist “agents of intolerance,” by which he meant men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The next day McCain lost the Virginia primary, and nine days later he withdrew his candidacy. For the 2008 election, McCain tried to smooth things over with the Religious Right, even giving the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University. But it was clear to evangelicals that McCain was not one of them. James Dobson certainly wasn’t buying it. Flexing his own political muscle, Dobson insisted that he “cannot and will not” vote for McCain, whom he deemed insufficiently conservative on social issues. Yet for Dobson, and for most evangelicals, the Democratic candidate was far more troubling.1 An African American with the middle name of Hussein, Barack Obama challenged the values—spoken and unspoken—that many white evangelicals held dear. As an adult convert to Christianity, he could speak with eloquence and theological sophistication about his faith, but for many evangelicals this mattered little. For some, racial prejudice shaped their political leanings. But even for those who did not hold explicit racist convictions, their faith remained intertwined with their whiteness. Although white evangelicals and black Protestants shared similar views on a number of theological and moral issues, the black Protestant tradition was suffused with a prophetic theology that clashed with white evangelicals’ Christian nationalism. It’s worth remembering that for both Barack and Michelle Obama, their unforgivable sins—at least as far as conservative white evangelicals were concerned—involved their critique of America. For Michelle, it was a confession she made while stumping for her husband; reflecting on the engagement of his supporters, she declared that, “for the first time” in her adult life, she was proud of her country because “it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Conservatives pounced. Hadn’t Michelle been an adult when the Cold War was won?

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  If you leave now, it’ll look like you got fired,” he says. “And they’ll do nothing to dispel that impression. In fact, they’ll probably tell people they fired you. They’ll do everything they can to make you look bad.” If I quit now, all the reporters and bloggers who wrote stories about me going to HubSpot are going to start asking questions. No way will HubSpot let the stink land on them when they’re getting ready to do a billion-dollar stock offering. “Stick around through the IPO,” Mike says. “Even if you have nothing to do with the IPO, if you’re working there when they go public, it will look good for you. Then once the offering is over you can get another job.” In fact, Mike says, once the IPO takes place I may have no choice but to find a new job—because I’ll probably get fired. Mike’s theory is that HubSpot hired me as a kind of publicity stunt. All they wanted was to get a little bit of good PR by bringing me on board. The downside of that is that once the IPO takes place they won’t need me. “Don’t take it personally,” he says. “This happens all the time. The company goes public and then they clean house. As soon as they register for an IPO, start looking for a new job.” Mike is a smart guy, and he spent years in the corporate world. I don’t know if he’s right about why HubSpot hired me, but in all the years I’ve known him, I can’t remember a time when he has been wrong. The funny thing is that I consider myself a pretty cynical person. But apparently there is a level of cynicism that I didn’t even know existed, a world occupied by guys like Mike and the people who run HubSpot, where I might be way out of my depth. Seven We Need to Make the Blog a Lot More Dumberer What exactly is my job? What am I supposed to do? After three months this remains unclear. I thought I would be working with Cranium, the CMO. But I rarely even see Cranium. I run into him in the hallway once in a while, and I see him at the weekly marketing department meeting, which he runs. One morning, when I get to work early, I sit with him in the kitchen, and we chat over a bowl of Cheerios. But that’s it. He never sets a meeting with me, never sits down and tells me what my job is supposed to be. He’s friendly, but he has no instructions or guidance. Just: Hey, glad you’re here. I’m starting to think that Mike, my buddy the former Microsoftie, might be correct about my hiring.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  12 .“Donald Trump Speech at Liberty University.” 13 .Mitzi Bible, “Donald Trump addresses largest Convocation crowd, praises Liberty’s growth,” Liberty University, Liberty News , September 24, 2012; Karen Swallow Prior, “The Fake ‘Holy War’ Over Donald Trump’s ‘Get Even’ Advice,” Christianity Today , October 3, 2012. 14 .Robin, Reactionary Mind , 29–30. 15 .Kelley Smith, “Trump holds campaign rally at Dordt College,” KSFY News, January 23, 2016; Boorstein, “Why Donald Trump is tearing evangelicals apart”; Eliza Collins, “Christian leaders balk at Falwell’s Trump endorsement,” Politico , January 26, 2016. 16 .Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, “The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy,’ the Comedian and Michael Cohen,” New York Times , June 18, 2019; Nick Gass, “Poll: Evangelicals flocking to Trump,” Politico , January 26, 2016. 17 .Ruth Graham, “The Pundit Pastor,” Slate , May 14, 2018; Ian Schwartz, “Pastor Jeffress: Without Trump We Will Have Most Pro-Abortion President in History,” Real Clear Politics, February 26, 2016; Bob Allen, “‘Evangelical elite’ just doesn’t get it, claims pastor and Trump supporter,” Baptist News Global, March 16, 2016. 18 .Bean, “Jesus and John Wayne: Must we choose?” 19 .Tessa Berenson, “John Wayne’s Daughter Endorses Donald Trump,” Time , updated January 19, 2016. 20 .Russell Moore, “Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?” New York Times , September 17, 2015; Trip Gabriel, “Donald Trump, Despite Impieties, Wins Hearts of Evangelical Voters,” New York Times , February 27, 2016; Russell Moore, “Why this election makes me hate the word ‘evangelical,’” Washington Post , February 29, 2016; Russell Moore, “A White Church No More,” New York Times , May 6, 2016; Elizabeth Dias, “Donald Trump’s Feud With Evangelical Leader Reveals Fault Lines,” Time , May 9, 2016. 21 .Denny Burk, “#NeverTrump has only just started,” Denny Burk (blog), May 4, 2016, http://www.dennyburk.com/nevertrump-has-only-just-started/; Michael Gerson, “Evangelicals must not bear the mark of Trump,” Washington Post , June 2, 2016. 22 .Gabriel, “Donald Trump, Despite Impieties.” 23 .Boorstein, “Why Donald Trump”; Trip Gabriel and Michael Luo, “A Born-Again Donald Trump? Believe It, Evangelical Leader Says,” New York Times , June 25, 2016. 24 .Wayne Grudem, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice,” Townhall , July 28, 2016. 25 .Jonathan Chait, “Mike Pence Strongly Believes Donald Trump’s Shoulder Width Guarantees His Foreign-Policy Acumen,” Intelligencer , August 22, 2017; Chris Cillizza, “Mike Pence compared Donald Trump to Teddy Roosevelt. About that. . .” CNN, August 18, 2017. 26 .Ward, “Author Eric Metaxas”; Eric Metaxas, Twitter post, May 22, 2016, 4:57 a.m., https://twitter.com/ericmetaxas/status/734352577710657536; Casey Harper, “Leading Evangelical Makes the Case for Christian Support of Trump,” Daily Caller, July 18, 2016. 27 .“Evangelicals Rally to Trump, Religious ‘Nones’ Back Clinton,” Pew Research Center, July 13, 2016. 28 .Phyllis Schlafly, “The Stupidity of Feminists,” Self-Educated American, May 21, 2012, accessed October 19, 2018, https://selfeducatedamerican.com/2012/05/21/the-stupidity-of-feminists/; Brody and Lamb, Faith of Donald J. Trump , 241; Rebecca Morin, “Trump honors ‘true patriot’ Phyllis Schlafly at her funeral,” Politico , September 10, 2016.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  My friends are taking a sadistic pleasure in watching me crash and burn. One, who works in PR, says I should start coloring my hair. “Show up tomorrow as a redhead,” she recommends. Another, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, suggests I need to change my Facebook photo to something that makes me look younger. I scan an old photo from my First Communion and make it my profile photo. There I am, age eight, wearing my First Communion robe, hands folded in prayer in front of me, looking angelic. “I’m trying to get a promotion at HubSpot,” I write. “The 8-year-old version of me has lots of ideas about how to expand geographically while also driving up MRR by pushing into the enterprise.” My friend the former Journal reporter says the twelve-year-olds at HubSpot better watch out for that old guy with the gray hair. “You misunderstand HubSpot,” I tell him. “The twelve-year-olds are running the place and they know best.” This is pure hara-kiri, ritual seppuku. But I figure there is no way to salvage the situation, and if I’m going to go out I should at least do it in style. Some of my HubSpot colleagues seemed genuinely baffled by my complaint. One of them—white, male, in his twenties—sends me an email asking why I’m so angry. I tell him that in retrospect I am not so much angry as I am disappointed and even amused. Halligan has made a classic Kinsley gaffe, named after the journalist Michael Kinsley, who defined gaffes as those moments when politicians slip up and reveal what they truly believe: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” Halligan really believes that the best way to build a tech company is to hire hundreds of young, inexperienced people, give them lots of free beer and parties, and turn them loose. He’s entitled to his opinion. He may even be right. That doesn’t make it smart for him to say it in public. I ask my young, white, male colleague to imagine that instead of saying that older people (gray hair and experience) are overrated, Halligan said that gay people are overrated, or women, or African-Americans, or Jews. Imagine Halligan saying, “We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain white people, because when it comes to technology, white people do a much better job than black people.” “But he didn’t say that!” my colleague responds. “He didn’t say anything about gays, or women, or black people!” As the Bible says: Jesus wept. In a way I almost feel relieved. I’m sick of HubSpot. I’m tired of trying to fit in. Now at least it’s over. It’s early December.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  He was always writing to me to come to visit him and on my return from Philadelphia, in 1875 I think, I stopped at Columbus and spent a couple of days with him. As soon as he heard that I had gone to Europe and had reached Paris, he wrote to me that he wished I had asked him to come with me and so I wrote setting forth my purpose and at once he threw up his good prospects of riches and honor and came to me in Paris. We lived together for some six months: he was a tall, strong fellow, with pale face and gray eyes; a good student, an honorable, kindly, very intelligent man; but we envisaged life from totally different sides and the longer we were together, the less we understood each other. In everything we were antipodes; he should have been an Englishman for he was a born aristocrat with imperious, expensive tastes, while I had really become a Western American, careless of dress or food or position, intent only on acquiring knowledge and, if possible, wisdom in order to reach greatness. The first evening we dined at Marguerite’s and spent the night talking and swapping news. The very next afternoon Ned would go into Paris and we dined in a swell restaurant on the Grand Boulevard. A few tables away a tall, splendid-looking brunette of perhaps thirty was dining with two men: I soon saw that Ned and she were exchanging looks and making signs. He told me he intended to go home with her: I remonstrated but he was as obstinate as Charlie, and when I told him of the risks he said he’d never do it again; but this time he couldn’t get out of it. “I’ll pay the bill at once”, I said, “and let’s go!” but he would not, desire was alight in him and a feeling of false shame hindered him from taking my advice. Half an hour later the lady made a sign and he went out with the party and when she entered her Victoria, he got in with her; the pair on the sidewalk, he said, bursting into laughter as he and the woman drove away together. Next morning he was back with me early, only saying that he had enjoyed himself hugely and was not even afraid. Her rooms were lovely, he declared; he had to give her a hundred francs: the bath and toilette arrangements were those of a queen: there was no danger. And he treated me to as wild a theory as Charlie had cherished: told me that the great _cocottes_ who make heaps of money took as much care of themselves as gentlemen. “Go with a common prostitute and you’ll catch something; go with a real topnotcher and she’s sure to be all right!” And perfectly at ease he went to work with a will.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We covered about thirty miles a day: Bob sat in the wagon and drove the four mules, while Bent and Charlie made us coffee and biscuits in the morning and cooked us sow-belly and any game we might bring in for dinner and supper. There was a small keg of rye whisky on the wagon; but we kept it for snake-bite or some emergency. I became the hunter to the outfit, for it was soon discovered that by some sixth sense I could always find my way back to the wagon on a bee-line, and only Bob of the whole party possessed the same instinct. Bob explained it by muttering “No Americano!” The instinct itself which has stood me in good stead more times than I can count, is in essence inexplicable: I feel the direction; but the vague feeling is strengthened by observing the path of the sun and the way the halms of grass lean, and the bushes grow. But it made me a valuable member of the outfit instead of a mere parasite midway between master and man, and it was the first step to Bob’s liking which taught me more than all the other haps of my early life. I had bought a shotgun and and a Winchester rifle and revolver in Kansas City and Reece had taught me how to get weapons that would fit me and this fact helped to make me a fair shot almost at once. But soon to my grief I found that I would never be a great shot; for Bob and Charlie and even Dell could see things far beyond my range of vision. I was shortsighted in fact through astigmatism and even glasses I discovered later, could not clear my blurred sight. It was the second or third disappointment of my life the others being the conviction of my personal ugliness and the fact that I should always be too short and small to be a great fighter or athlete. As I went on in life I discovered more serious disabilities but they only strengthened my deep-seated resolve to make the most of any qualities I might possess and meanwhile the life was divinely new and strange and pleasureful.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The movement remained overwhelmingly white; a 1998 questionnaire revealed that whites made up 90 percent of its membership. Moreover, some observers link the decline of the Promise Keepers movement to its pursuit of racial reconciliation. McCartney himself conceded that the focus on race was “a major factor in the significant fall-off” in attendance—it was “simply a hard teaching for many.” In 1996, for instance, 40 percent of complaints registered by conference participants were negative responses to the theme of racial reconciliation. The falloff in attendance caused a significant decline in revenue, and in the summer of 1997 Promise Keepers laid off more than one hundred employees; the next two years witnessed successive waves of restructuring and downsizing.14 Other factors also contributed to the organization’s decline. The high attendance at the Stand in the Gap rally in Washington, DC, probably meant men were less likely to spend money to attend local and regional gatherings. The novelty was also wearing off; without new content it was harder to entice men to attend conferences. But there was also a shift within evangelicalism that would begin to render the “soft patriarchy” that Promise Keepers espoused less appealing. By the end of the decade, the emotional timbre of the events had started to feel too “soft.”15 Promise Keepers as a movement began to wane, but by spawning dozens of smaller denominational ministries and parachurch groups, its influence persisted. The Southern Baptist Convention entered cooperative agreements with Promise Keepers and developed its own men’s ministry. The Assemblies of God appointed a “men’s ministries secretary” to work with Promise Keepers, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) developed its own men’s Bible study series. Catholics, too, organized two new men’s ministries, the Saint Joseph’s Covenant Keepers and a Ministry to Black Catholic Men.16 The proliferation of men’s groups sparked “a minor revolution in the Christian publishing and retailing industry.” At PK events one could find “a virtual messianic mini-mall, hawking books, T-shirts,” souvenirs and baseball caps. Christian retailers, too, began stocking shelves with men’s products. As the president of the Christian Booksellers Association explained, more men started shopping in Christian bookstores because there was more there for them to buy; in 1996, nearly one-quarter of customers were men, up from one in six fifteen years earlier. The most lasting influence of the Promise Keepers movement may well have been the market it spawned.17 THANKS TO THE EVANGELICAL men’s movement, books on Christian masculinity began to roll off the presses. Drawing on charismatic and therapeutic traditions, prosperity teachings, Christian Reconstructionism, conservative Southern Baptist theology, and neo-Calvinism, authors ended up crafting visions of Christian masculinity that looked remarkably similar. In the 1990s, the most popular “blueprint for Christian manhood” to emerge was that of the “tender warrior.” Setting the stage for the genre was Gordon Dalbey’s Healing the Masculine Soul . It was published in 1988, but Dalbey had been struggling to come to terms with masculinity since the 1970s.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Then experience of the confused religious situation in central Europe, with Protestantism rapidly expanding particularly among local elites, shocked Ignatius’s assistant Jerónimo Nadal into launching the Society into a new strategy of positive action against Protestants. In the general tidying-up of early Jesuit history that took place in the 1560s and after, Nadal made sure that this appeared to have been one of the Society’s original purposes. The Jesuits joined and now indeed exemplified the ‘Counter-Reformation’, yet always on the Society’s own terms. Notably, they have nearly always remained aloof from the work of inquisitions, and, until the twenty-first century, there had never been a Jesuit Pope. [67] Given the Society’s initial fluidity of purpose and character, why should it not include women in its ranks? After all, energetic elite female supporters were crucial to steering it past male suspicions, and particularly in making it acceptable to the governments crucial to its world expansion, those of the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. Some of these women saw no reason why they should not be enrolled in the membership; their efforts included lobbying Pope Paul III. Ignatius’s resistance to these moves against contrary enthusiasm from some of his colleagues is significant. In the early years he was unable to block one or two especially influential ladies, culminating with Joanna of Portugal, sister of King Philip II of Spain, but he swore her to silence on her membership and made sure that no woman ever again became a Jesuit. [68] In the early seventeenth century a remarkable Englishwoman, Mary Ward, took a different approach, devoting her life to creating an organization for women that would parallel the Society, working in the world and living by the Jesuit constitution. She had some strong and impressive supporters among the Jesuits, but the Society’s opinions were divided, and her programme was simply too much for the male clerical leadership of the Church that she wished to serve. Pope Urban VIII banned her ‘Institute’ in 1639, but in a remarkable act of quiet disobedience, she and her colleagues found ways of working around the ban, and successors continued in their calling to the present day; we will meet them again in central Europe a century after the papal ban (below, Chapter 16). As recently as 2002, Pope John Paul II officially recognized Mary Ward’s continuing community under a name that she had wished for them, the ‘Congregation of Jesus’; he even began the process towards Ward’s sanctification. That belated vindication is a welcome act of restitution, but it could hardly reshape events in the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Church. There was no similar initiative at that time anywhere else in Europe, with the significant exception of an earlier though short-lived community in western Ireland.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  A commercial success, The Green Berets offered fans a make-believe substitute for the actual war, one that perpetuated the myth of American greatness. To conservatives, the fact that both films were “viciously panned and vilified, dismissed as rightest message films and artistic duds,” was another point in their favor, even more confirmation that cultural elites disdained heroic masculinity. Like the heroes Wayne played onscreen, conservatives’ sense of embattlement only heightened their resolve.43 [image "image" file=Image00007.jpg] John Wayne starring as Colonel Mike Kirby in The Green Berets , 1968. TCD / PROD .DB / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO . The mythical wars Wayne fabricated had very real repercussions. As one working-class Vietnam veteran later recalled, he went to Vietnam to “kill a Commie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne.” It was Sands of Iwo Jima that inspired Ron Kovic to volunteer for the marines during the Vietnam War, a war that would cost him the use of his legs and lead to a disenchantment with war that he chronicled in his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July . Offscreen, too, Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort, ridiculing as “soft” those who didn’t enlist. One critic labeled Wayne “the most important man in America,” given the role his films played in driving American engagement in Vietnam.44 However, the war heroes Wayne played left recruits ill-prepared for the realities of war. Onscreen, good triumphed over evil, and the lines between the two were clearly drawn. War was a place where boys became men and men became heroes, where America was a force for good, and where American ends justified any means. Shipped overseas, new recruits soon learned that real war fell far short of this ideal. Reared on a false narrative of wartime heroism, many men were haunted by the sense that they somehow failed to measure up. As for making boys into men, Kovic reflected bitterly that the war robbed him of his manhood: “I gave my dead dick for John Wayne.” Wayne himself had secured a deferment in order to avoid serving in a war with a far more clear-cut division between good and evil.45 For veterans like Kovic, the disconnect between expectation and reality led to disillusionment. Many conservatives, however, continued to cling fiercely to the role of the military in defining American manhood and preserving American greatness. Those inspired by Wayne’s bravado came to see all of life as a war, and toughness as a virtue. This had repercussions on a personal level, and on a global one. Indeed, critics characterized American foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s as afflicted with a “John Wayne syndrome.”46 Through his films and his politics, Wayne established himself as the embodiment of rugged, all-American masculinity. Understanding the man and the myth—and it was not clear where one left off and the other began—is key to understanding his enduring legacy. To begin with, Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  And this brings us back to 'science' from which we diverted our attention so long ago (see p. 640). Science thinks she has discovered the objective realities in question. Atoms and ether, with no properties but masses and velocities expressible by numbers, and paths expressible by analytic formulas, these at last are things over which the mathematico-logical network may be flung, and by supposing which instead of sensible phenomena science becomes yearly more able to manufacture for herself a world about which rational propositions may be framed. Sensible phenomena are pure delusions for the mechanical philosophy. The 'things' and qualities we instinctively believe in do not exist. The only realities are swarming solids in everlasting motion, undulatory or continued, whose expressionless and meaningless changes of position form the history of the world, and are deducible from initial collocations and habits of movement hypothetically assumed. Thousands of years ago men started to cast the chaos of nature's sequences and juxtapositions into a form that might seem intelligible. Many were their ideal prototypes of rational order: teleological and æsthetic ties between things, causal and substantial bonds, as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes, whilst that of the sentimentally richer systems is one of relative sterility and failure.[568] Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as ends and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative, harmonious and discordant, fit and unfit, natural and unnatural, etc., and barren are all your results. In the ideal world the kind 'precious' has characteristic properties. What is precious should be preserved; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake; exceptions made on its account; its preciousness is a reason for other things' actions, and the like. But none of these things need happen to your 'precious' object in the real world. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental, moral, and æsthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming. They may be of the kinds you allege, but they are not of 'the kind's kind; and the last great system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was obliged explicitly to repudiate logic in order to make any inferences at all from the names he called things by.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In 1968, they were at last about to make public their findings; they had concluded that there was no good argument for banning contraceptive devices. [17] The Pope was alarmed. He enlarged the commission and changed the criteria for those entitled to vote, hoping for a different outcome: instead, it was reinforced. So, finally, he ignored the commission’s work and instead accepted a conservative minority recommendation reaffirming Casti Connubii. Just to emphasize how much the spirit of 1930 lived on, this minority report specifically pointed to the Anglican Communion’s reverse of direction on birth control, and observed that for the Catholic Church to follow suit would imply that the Holy Spirit was active outside the Roman obedience. [18] On this basis, Paul VI issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘Of Human Life’), which gave no place for artificial contraception in a Catholic family. To his astonishment and dismay, the case was not closed when Rome had spoken. What the Pope had not appreciated was that Catholic laity had already been quietly thinking for themselves on this issue, and indeed had re-evaluated their Catholicism on the basis of their conclusions. A sensitive analysis of opinion among American Catholics in the 1960s speaks of a new sense among them of ‘moral autonomy – a process nearly always connected to agonizing over contraception’. [19] There were open and angry protests both lay and clerical all over the Catholic world, and, worse still, demographics soon revealed that millions of Catholic laity were paying no attention to the papal ban – as emphatic a rejection as the earlier reaction to Anglican efforts to limit the sale of contraceptives. Paul VI never really recovered from the shock and took no initiatives of significance in the remaining decade of his pontificate. [20] It was the first time that the Catholic faithful – and Catholic families in particular – had so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure intimate parts of their lives, but it has not been the last sexual topic on which Catholic laypeople have parted company with the authority of the Church as presented to them. NEW VOICES FOR CHRISTIAN WOMEN Entangled with the story of a reproductive revolution is the ongoing readjustment of gender relations and definitions between women, men and others; they offer an alternative story to a great many assumptions about these matters that have shaped three thousand years of Judaism and Christianity. The new feminism of the modern age might not have taken the shape that it has done were it not for the invention of the contraceptive pill in the mid-twentieth century, yet the expenditure of time and scientific funding on that success may have become a desirable priority precisely because gender relations in Western society were already changing.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Far from being discouraged by this outward token of Acciaiuoli’s lack of esteem for the friend of his youth, Boccaccio continued to court his patronage almost up to the time of Acciaiuoli’s death on 8 November 1365, though his attitude to the Grand Seneschal was by no means always one of fawning subservience. In the eighth of the sixteen Latin eclogues that comprise, under the title of Buccolicum carmen, Boccaccio’s own contribution to that arcane and allusive genre of Latin poetry which both Dante and Petrarch had sought without success to revive, he complains of the indifference of Acciaiuoli during his Neapolitan journey of 1355. But it was only after yet another fruitless expedition to Naples that began in October 1362 and ended five months later that the full force of his invective was released, in a letter to Francesco Nelli. Having been expressly invited by Acciaiuoli to make his home in Naples, he had set off with his stepbrother Iacopo from Tuscany, in high hopes and with all of his books, only to discover upon his arrival that the lodging to which he had been allocated was quite unfit for human habitation. The shortcomings of the place are described in minute detail in the letter to Nelli, a fellow Florentine who occupied a prominent position at the Angevin court. The letter was probably never sent, however, for there is no record of any response in the correspondence of either Nelli or Acciaiuoli. Meanwhile, in 1359–60, Boccaccio had given a significant new impetus to humanistic studies by persuading the Florentine Studium to establish the first chair of Greek in non-Byzantine Europe, and to invite Leontius Pilatus to occupy it. Leontius had been a pupil of the celebrated Greek scholar Barlaam of Calabria, whom Boccaccio had known in Naples, once describing him as ‘tiny of body but very great in knowledge’, and who had attempted in vain to teach the rudiments of Greek to Petrarch in Avignon. During his brief tenure of the Florentine chair, Leontius, whose unkempt appearance and barbaric manners are described in a passage of the Genealogia deorum gentilium, was a guest in Boccaccio’s house, and it was Boccaccio who prodded him into completing the first, rudimentary translations into Latin of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as some of the works of Euripides and Aristotle. As for his lectures at the Studium, they aroused much adverse comment, not only because of the man’s extraordinary boorishness, but because the instruction he provided was not sufficiently practical for those young Florentines preparing for a mercantile or diplomatic career in the eastern Mediterranean. All the same, Boccaccio prided himself with good reason on the role he had played in ensuring that the study of ancient Greek literature should take its place alongside the almost exclusively Latin-based researches of the fourteenth-century Italian humanists.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Evangelical Revival and Great Awakening brought another form of potential liberation: for women. They allowed women new opportunities of self- expression and achievement, as so often when new religious movements grow and improvise, but – equally characteristically – as new institutions settled down into masculine patterns those opportunities were curtailed. The Moravian ‘Sifting Time’ was an unsurprising example. Count von Zinzendorf had travelled down some surprisingly radical theological pathways: he rejected the Virgin Birth or any notion of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and emphasized the role of the Holy Spirit as Mother, picking up a Christian theme last prominent in third- or fourth-century Syria. He parted company with Reformation Protestantism and Augustine of Hippo sufficiently to reject the idea of original sin, including Eve’s part in the Fall, which led him to allow women into the Moravian presbyterate. Much of this went missing when the Church was remodelled after the Sifting Time, the chief casualty predictably being female ordination. [44] The Methodist movement shows the same general profile from opportunity to exclusion. John Wesley’s own personal relationships with women were tumultuous, starting with the fiasco of his venture as a Church of England chaplain to the new British colony of Georgia in 1737, sent home in disgrace after he had irresponsibly mixed pastoral care with female emotional entanglements. In 1748 his brother Charles (fearing further scandal over a social mismatch) sabotaged John’s plans to marry Grace Murray, a Methodist society housekeeper and John’s companion on a preaching tour in Ireland. John’s impulsive rebound-marriage to a well-off widow, Mary Vazeille, proved a bad mistake, and ended in separation. [45] He channelled later passions into several apparently chaste intense friendships with female followers; the positive aspect of his preoccupations was that he listened to women and sympathized with their wish for active roles in Methodist mission more than most of his male contemporaries. The house journal Wesley founded for the Connexion in 1778, the Arminian Magazine (later Methodist Magazine), gave almost equal space to biographical or autobiographical writings from women as from men, and in 1782, with remarkable risk-taking, it published a quarter-century-old correspondence about one of the relationships that had caused Wesley’s wife particular grief, Wesley defiantly commenting on the importance of the letters’ spiritual content. [46] Wesley’s capricious editorial control in the Magazine is symptomatic. Early Methodism was indeed ‘a movement of women, who formed a clear majority of society members almost everywhere Methodism took root’, but it remained publicly run by men. [47] Wesley’s emotional impulses held the key to the exceptions. He was not generally in favour of women becoming preachers but encouraged Methodist women to lead small bible-study and devotional groups (‘classes’) and spread the gospel in informal ways. Mrs Sarah Crosby, one of the younger female recipients of his passions (and, like him, separated from her spouse), regularly exchanged letters with him and won his cautious approval for a public preaching ministry, against his original High Church instincts. It likewise began against her inclinations.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That kissing and caressing a girl could inculcate self-restraint is not taught by our spiritual guides and masters; but is nevertheless true. Another cognate experience came at this time to reinforce the same lesson. I had read all Scott and his heroine Di Vernon made a great impression on me. I resolved now to keep all my passion for some Di Vernon in the future. Thus the first experiences of passion and the reading of a love story completely cured me of the bad habit of self-abuse. Naturally after this first divine experience, I was on edge for a second and keen as a questing hawk. I could not see E… till the next music-lesson, a week to wait; but even such a week comes to an end, and once more we were imprisoned in our solitude behind the piano; but though I whispered all the sweet and pleading words I could imagine, E… did nothing but frown refusal and shake her pretty head. This killed for the moment all my faith in girls: why did she act so? I puzzled my brain for a reasonable answer and found none. It was part of the damned inscrutability of girls but at the moment it filled me with furious anger. I was savage with disappointment. “You’re mean!” I whispered to her at long last and I would have said more if the organist hadn’t called on me for a solo which I sang very badly, so badly indeed that he made me come from behind the piano and thus abolished even the chance of future intimacies. Time and again I cursed organist and girl, but I was always on the alert for a similar experience. As dog fanciers say of hunting dogs, “I had tasted blood and could never afterwards forget the scent of it.” Twenty-five years or more later, I dined with Frederic Chapman, the publisher of “The Fortnightly Review”, which I was then editing; he asked me some weeks afterwards had I noticed a lady and described her dress to me, adding, “She was very curious about you. As soon as you came into the room she recognized you and has asked me to tell her if you recognized her; did you?” I shook my head: “I’m near-sighted, you know”, I said, “and therefore to be forgiven, but when did she know me?” He replied, “As a boy at school; she said you would remember her by her Christian name of E….” “Of course I do”, I cried, “Oh! please tell me her name and where she lives. I’ll call on her, I want (and then reflection came to suggest prudence) to ask her some questions”, I added lamely. “I can’t give you her name or address”, he replied, “I promised her not to, but she’s long been happily married I was to tell you.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The creed we professed and the creed we practised were poles apart. Never I believe in the world’s history was there such confusion in man’s thought about conduct, never were there so many different ideals put forward for his guidance. It is imperatively necessary for us to bring clearness into this muddle and see why we have gone wrong and where. For the world-war is only the last of a series of diabolical acts which have shocked the conscience of humanity. The greatest crimes in recorded time have been committed during the last half century almost without protest by the most civilised nations, nations that still call themselves Christian. Whoever has watched human affairs in the last half century must acknowledge that our progress has been steadily hell-ward. The hideous massacres and mutilations of tens of thousands of women and children in the Congo Free State without protest on the part of Great Britain who could have stopped it all with one word, is surely due to the same spirit that directed the abominable blockade (continued by both England and America long after the Armistice) which condemned hundreds and thousands of women and children of our own kith and kin to death by starvation. The unspeakable meanness and confessed fraud of the Peace of Versailles with its tragic consequences from Vladivostock to London and finally the shameless, dastardly war waged by all the Allies and by America on Russia, for money, show us that we have been assisting at the overthrow of morality itself and returning to the ethics of the wolf and the polity of the Thieves’ Kitchen. And our public acts as nations are paralleled by our treatment of our fellows within the community. For the small minority the pleasures of living have been increased in the most extraordinary way while the pains and sorrows of existence have been greatly mitigated, but the vast majority even of civilised peoples have hardly been admitted to any share in the benefits of our astounding material progress. The slums of our cities show the same spirit we have displayed in our treatment of the weaker races. It is no secret that over fifty per cent of English volunteers in the war were below the pigmy physical standard required and about one half of our American soldiers were morons with the intelligence of children under twelve years of age: “vae victis” has been our motto with the most appalling results. Clearly we have come to the end of a period and must take thought about the future.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  In 2015 he launched his own nationally syndicated daily radio program, The Eric Metaxas Show .18 Metaxas specialized in writing about Christian heroes. His 2007 book, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery , helped secure his position in the evangelical world. In Metaxas’s narrative, evangelical Christians were the good guys; sharing “God’s perspective on the subject,” they rejected “the abominable racial views” held by non-Christians and “cultural Christians.” In 2011 he published Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Metaxas’s version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bore an uncanny resemblance to conservative American evangelicals, in that he battled not only Nazis but the liberal Christians purportedly behind the rise of Nazism. Once again, evangelicals emerged as heroes. Evangelicals loved the book. Meanwhile, historians panned it; the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust described it as “a terrible oversimplification and at times misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s thought, the theological and ecclesial world of his times, and the history of Nazi Germany.”19 [image "image" file=Image00014.jpg] Eric Metaxas delivering the keynote at the 60th annual National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 2, 2012. REUTERS / LARRY DOWNING . In his 2013 book, 7 Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness , Metaxas revealed the larger purpose behind his biographies. He wanted to clear up the confusion around “the idea of manhood” by addressing two “vitally important questions”: What is a man? And what makes a man great? The answer started with none other than John Wayne. Wayne was the “icon of manhood and manliness.” He had “toughness and swagger,” but he used his strength to protect the weak. Generations of men were inspired by his model of masculinity, until something happened. That something was the 1960s.20 The transformation probably had something to do with Vietnam or Watergate, Metaxas mused. Until Vietnam, wars were seen as worth fighting and patriotic Americans dutifully defended the country and its freedoms. Vietnam changed all that. “Ditto with Watergate,” which presented us with a president acting not at all presidential. Since that time, people had focused on the negative when it came to famous people, and it was hard to have heroes in a climate like that. Making matters worse, Americans had extended this critique back through history. No longer heralded as a selfless and heroic Founding Father, George Washington was denounced as a wealthy landowner and hypocritical slave owner. Instead of celebrating Christopher Columbus as the “intrepid visionary” he was, Americans now pilloried the explorer as a murderer of indigenous peoples. Metaxas conceded that “idol worship” wasn’t a good thing, but being “overly critical” of good men could also be incredibly destructive.21 For Metaxas, the decline of heroic masculinity undermined Christian nationalism and eroded patriarchal authority. Just compare the 1950s television show Father Knows Best with the way the mainstream media had come to depict fathers, “either as dunces or as overbearing fools.” But the country was paying the bitter price for their rejection of authority.